


A Chain of Gold

by Erato_Muse



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Bartender Remus Lupin, Book 4: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Full Moon, Inspired by Charles Dickens, M/M, Not Canon Compliant - Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Pet Names, Werewolf Turning, affectionate nicknames, lycanthropy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:28:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25827448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Erato_Muse/pseuds/Erato_Muse
Summary: Shortly after returning to Hogsmeade in GoF, Sirius happens upon Remus post-transformation in the forest, and takes him home to the Hog's Head, where Remus has been making a living as a bartender. They hash out some lingering issues from the past, renew their bond, and vow to be there for Harry and each other as darkness rises in the Wizarding World once more.
Relationships: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12





	A Chain of Gold

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by the burn care scene in 'Great Expectations' by Charles Dickens, where Herbert calls Pip 'Dear boy'.

Remus woke to the familiar sound of “Clair de Lune” by Claude Debussy. The way the piece moved, like moonlight glistening on the lapping waves of a midnight lake, always soothed him, and made him happy. But how could there be music in the forest? He’d made sure to hike out to the densest forests in the foothills of the Black Mountains overlooking the quaint Victorian village of Hogsmeade. Hogwarts, on the other side of the village, glared at the mountains as if the two were hostile neighbors, both imposing monuments of stone, one shaped by nature, one by oldest magic. Remus was sure he was hallucinating, that the transition from man to wolf, wolf to man, had finally warped his senses. The Wolf’s Bane Potion was supposed to make it safe for him to transform and run freely in the woods, then transform and discreetly make it back to where he had hidden some clothes, food, and water.  
He opened his eyes. He was in a small, sparsely furnished bedroom, and beneath him he felt a firm mattress. Lying over his body was a series of blankets. These were warm, comfy human things, and they felt like home and love…He saw a Victrola on the bedside table, and from its broad horn poured the lustrous music.  
“Where am I?” Remus asked, and even before he noticed Sirius sprawled in a dusty armchair across from the bed, he knew that it would be him who answered.  
“Aberforth Dumbledore’s Home For Wayward Boys,” he said, in that voice Remus knew and loved, so well…a bit of the Received Pronunciation his aristocratic parents had foisted on him, mixed with the grimy cadences of the rougher parts of London he had snuck off to, to see punk rock shows and get tattooed with arcane runes.  
“The Hog’s Head,” Remus said.  
“Right in one, Moony,” Sirius said, and pulled his chair to the side of the bed.  
Remus’s eyes hungered to marvel at the transformation in him, between this moment lit by golden gaslight and that night in the Shrieking Shack. Wherever he had been hiding was doing him good: he was always fair, but his skin was not unhealthily pale, his frame had filled out, he was thinner than when he was a Beater on the Gryffindor Quidditch team but he looked healthily lean, and his face was young, handsome once again…a proud nose, full lips, and striking gray eyes full intrigue. He was constantly shaking his long dark hair out of those eyes. Remus felt full and nourished as he looked at Sirius. Sirius, who must have found him in the dark forest, and brought him home, to his room above the pub.  
“You’ve lived here, since Snape got you sacked?” Sirius asked.  
Remus nodded. “I tend bar. I suppose I do so quite well, Aberforth doesn’t have any complaints,” Remus said. “and, as Severus also stopped making my potion….so, I live close to the forest, where Wolf’s Bane grows, and I make it for myself, as best as I can.”  
“As best as you can…always too modest, Remus. You got an O on your O.W.L in Potions, from what I recall,” Sirius said.  
“How do you remember things like that, Sirius?” Remus said.  
“After being Demented night and day by infernal wraiths that wreak misery and gloom, you mean?” Sirius said, with a hint of theatricality in his subtly posh drawl.  
Remus smirked at Sirius’s dramatic streak. “No, I mean…things about me.”  
His mysterious eyes filled with warmth. It was like seeing sunshine on the Black Lake.  
“Of course, dear boy,” Sirius said.  
He looked into Remus’s eyes, and held them. He was sure that Sirius could see the warmth in his, Remus’s heart, and the way it suffused throughout his whole body, warmed his soul. He was also stabbed with guilt, which spread like ink bleeding into water. How? How could he have believed Sirius to be a traitor? Sirius, who hated dark magic with a passion, whose brother had died in the service of Voldemort, whose will was too strong for the methods of enslavement Voldemort commonly employed, who would have died for the people he loved…  
‘Forgive me,’ Remus wanted to say.  
“How did you find me?” He asked, instead.  
“I know you, that’s how,” Sirius asked, waiting and leaning in to the end of the sentence to see if Sirius would call him ‘Dear boy’, again. It didn’t come, and he felt a stitch in his heart.  
‘Careful, Lupin: I think that’s what the kids call being ‘thirsty,’ he told himself.  
“And,” Sirius added, “I want to be close to Hogwarts. Harry’s scar is hurting, and there have been some…odd happenings. I’ve heard things, in hiding…”  
“And how does a man staying off the grid ‘hear things,’ Sirius?” Remus asked shrewdly.  
“Because a man, even off the grid, gets the occasional whim to go into a pub-with the hood of his robe pulled up, over his face, of course-and listen to what’s what and who’s who in the Wizarding World,” Sirius said.  
Remus was beyond telling Sirius not to take risks like that. He was good at getting information, and having an ear to the ground. In a different world, he would have been one Hell of an Auror. He’d never gotten a chance. The war broke out when they were all so young, and shortly after graduating Hogwarts, Dumbledore tapped them for the Order of the Phoenix. James and Sirius had eagerly agreed-they’d toyed with the idea of being Aurors, but liked the idea of being able to fight Voldemort and skip the official Ministry training.  
“And, what have you heard?” Remus asked.  
“I’d best leave it to Dumbledore,” Sirius said.  
“Don’t play the coy lady now!” Remus said.  
Sirius’s eyes widened in surprise, and then his lips languidly spread into a grin. He looked like he was savoring the moment, that it was satisfying him greatly, and Remus felt the echoes of that look in his belly.  
“You need your rest, dear boy,” Sirius said. How could Sirius have known, how he had hung onto the empty air, listening into the last words of his sentences for those two words, and how they calmed and filled, soothed, and caressed him, like loving hands.  
“What do you mean, Harry’s scar hurt? Can a scar left by a curse feel pain?” Remus said. He had never heard of such a thing. No one had ever survived the Killing Curse with just a scar, as Harry had.  
“I don’t know, that one’s new to me, too, and Merlin knows my sweet old mother knew a plethora of ways to leave scars with dark magic. But, they heal like any scars-who knows what effects surviving the Killing Curse leaves?” Sirius said, and he was clearly worried.  
“The Unspeakables would probably love to study that very subject, at the Department of Mysteries,” Remus said, offhandedly.  
He had hoped to be one, but as he got older it became clear that werewolves did not generally hold those kinds of jobs in the Wizarding World. And, then, even if an exception could have been made for him…the war.  
“Harry isn’t an experiment,” Sirius growled, gruffly and firmly. Remus knew it came from protective love, but he flinched. Sirius had a harsh side-he loved and hated fully, fiercely, decisively, with passion that could be overwhelming.  
“Of course not. I know Harry, I taught him, I adore him. I only mean, his case…it’s a mystery to our entire world,” Remus said.  
Sirius combed his hair away from his face with his fingers. He sighed deflatedly, and said,  
“Forgive me, dear boy. I get a little crazy, sometimes-I don’t know if you ever noticed,” Sirius said.  
Remus laughed.  
“So, you happened upon me in the forest…which means, you were in your Animagus form-I gather you’re going to disguise yourself prolongedly as a dog and keep tabs on Harry throughout the school year, like you did last year?” Remus said.  
Sirius nodded. “I may only have one trick up my sleeve, but it works well enough,” he said.  
“You’ve got more tricks than one, Sirius. But, it is a risk. Whatever you’ve heard…do you think it has to do with the Death Eaters? Some may still live in hope that Voldemort will rise again, and maybe they think that harming Harry will…draw him out, or help him to return, somehow. Or, a new Dark Lord has stepped up to fill the power vacuum, and gathered the old hands about him,” Remus said.  
“Whatever it is, I’m not leaving him alone. I don’t care what I have to do, or what happens to me,” Sirius said, with grim but passionate resolve that filled his face with vivid life, and sculpted his features into their most fascinating. He could be Henry V before his last battle, or Hector before leaving Andromache and Astyanax to face the enraged hero Achilles.  
Remus fought a sigh.  
“James and Lily chose rightly,” he said.  
“You would have done the same…without ending up in prison,” Sirius said.  
“Why, Sirius? Why did you go out to kill Peter? I know what he did, but…you knew it wouldn’t end well, that you wouldn’t have been able to go back to Harry. He needed you that night,” Remus said.  
“And I begged! Begged Hagrid to give him to me…I was going to take him home,” Sirius said. “He said Dumbledore had ordered him to take him to his aunt’s house, and you know how he is about Dumbledore…he was inflexible. And I know I could have tried again later, talked to Dumbledore, gone and told him what Peter had done…but, I was in a state, Moony. I’d just seen Lily’s and James’s bodies…and…”  
He faltered, beginning in passion, sputtering into bewilderment. Remus knew. When Lily had started to warm up to them, not much had changed between her and Remus-they shared Prefect duties, she was the first person Remus had told that he was interested in other boys romantically, and she had confided in him when Severus called her a ‘mudblood’-they had a strong friendship already.  
But, Sirius was a different case: after years of sympathetic dislike of him when she was friends with Snape, Lily saw that Sirius was terribly vulnerable and desperately loyal to those he cared about, and in need of tough love every now and again. After being friends with a Slytherin for most of her life, she didn’t flinch at Sirius’s dark magic origins, and in a way it was a redemption of her friendship with Snape: rather than pushing her away, Sirius trusted her judgement and dearly wanted to be a better person than he had learned how to be from the adults of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black. Lily became a kind but tough, loving and brutally honest big sister. And on that dark, terrible Halloween, he had lost a brother and a sister. Remus knew how he must have shattered. He was fragile, all along.  
“I never knew that you asked for Harry, that you weren’t allowed to raise him,” Remus said.  
“Dumbledore knows best,” he added, with a resigned sigh.  
“I don’t know about that, but, you didn’t hear that from me,” Sirius said. “Well, I’m here, now. And, turns out this place has one more open position to fill for a midnight barkeep. Seems the current fellow does an admirable job, but he misses a week out of work once every month.”  
“Aberforth never would have agreed to hire you, a wanted fugitive…” Remus said.  
“On the caveat that I keep my hood up, he surely did. Who knows, maybe he’s taking the mickey out of Albus,” Sirius said. “They don’t seem to get on, do they?”  
“We’ll be near Harry, both of us-no matter what’s coming,” Sirius said.  
“This changes everything, Sirius. Now….I know,” Remus said.  
“Now you know,” Sirius said, and reached for Remus’s hands. He held them tenderly.  
The words washed over Remus, and the touch of Sirius’s hands against Remus’s hands filled him with molten warmth. They looked into each other’s eyes, and Remus knew Sirius understood: now that he knew that Sirius had begged to be allowed to raise Harry and been denied, he understood why he had lost control on Halloween all those years ago. Sirius did care, he truly did.  
Remus felt a spike of fluttering anxiety as Sirius slid into bed with him. Remus moved to cover them both up, but Sirius grasped the covers and did it for him as he moved closer. Remus felt cotton and denim hotly chafe his flesh, and behind it the body heat flaring from Sirius’s lean but strong body, firm and grounding behind him. Remus relented, he snuggled into Sirius, and allowed him to cover them up with the blankets.  
“Look at me, dear boy,” Sirius whispered, his voice full of emotion. Remus’s whiskey brown eyes met Sirius’s lake gray eyes, and the warmth he found there held him in Sirius’s gaze like the planets in obeisance to the blazing sun.  
“I am looking at you,” Remus whispered playfully, and delighted in seeing the smirk slowly dawn on Sirius’s lips. He felt his smile unfurl, felt it inside him.  
“Forgive me, dear boy,” Sirius said.  
“I do forgive you. Forgive me, Sirius,” Remus said.  
He wrapped his arms around Remus’s waist, and Remus closed his eyes as Sirius kissed him.  
They would be there. This kiss was a promise that the past was understood, forgiven and would be set aside, now, as they prepared for whatever was coming, slouching towards them from beyond the mountains and the castle. They would be there, for Harry, and for each other.


End file.
